Heating + cooling contractor · Built in 7 days
Warm trades, real urgency, no template smell.
Pickering, Ontario
Open the live site
Fonts
Fraunces + Inter + Caveat
Palette
Navy / Orange / Cream
Photos
Real shop photography
The brief
Most HVAC sites look interchangeable: navy hero, three service tiles, a stock photo of someone holding a clipboard. We needed Sarah in Ajax at 11pm with no heat to feel like she'd reached an actual shop. The site had to read as competent, picking-up-the-phone, real-people work without a single 'we are passionate about HVAC' line.
The decisions
01 · Typography
Fraunces serif at heavy weights for headlines, Inter for body. Fraunces carries the trades-warmth (it has personality) without sliding into editorial; Inter keeps the body practical. No italic ornament except inside hand-written annotations.
02 · Palette
Navy ground (#0E1F33), warm cream type (#FAF7F2), single hi-vis orange accent (#E5552B). The orange is reserved for emergency moments and CTAs; everywhere else the palette is quiet. Vignette overlays sit on every navy section to ground the warmth.
03 · Photo treatment
Real photography only. Tech in the shop, truck on the driveway, hands on a furnace. Photos are contained (4:5 portrait on desktop, square on mobile) with a faint cream border and a subtle asymmetric orange accent line on the bottom-left.
04 · Voice
Warm-trades-confident. The site talks TO homeowners (Sarah in Ajax) not about businesses. Specific over abstract: 'When the furnace dies at 11pm, we pick up' instead of 'available for emergency repairs.' Times, places, names of techs, real numbers everywhere.
Craft moments
Yours next?
Every Ostra site starts the same way: a 3-question brief and an honest conversation about what makes your business actually different. The result looks nothing like the others.